Romney's World

A contrast with Obama on the benefits of U.S. global leadership.

Updated Oct. 10, 2012 12:01 a.m. ET

Following his boffo debate on domestic affairs, Mitt Romney turned to foreign policy Monday in a major speech at the Virginia Military Institute. "America's security and the cause of freedom," he said, "cannot afford four more years like the last four years."

The speech is an important moment as a window on Mr. Romney's principles and instincts as Commander in Chief. Within half an hour of delivery, President Obama's surrogates were portraying the Republican as erratic, uninformed and dangerous—supposedly George W. Bush with better diction. Yet the man who took the VMI stage came off as serious, pragmatic and cautious, possibly to a fault.

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His broad strokes offered a welcome contrast to Mr. Obama's view that America must defer to other nations to win global favor. Mr. Romney recognized the electorate's understandable war fatigue, but he still made a case for the world's only superpower to reassert its leadership, most of all in the Middle East.

A Romney Administration wouldn't "lead from behind" or defer to the United Nations. "If America does not lead, others will—others who do not share our interests and our values—and the world will grow darker, for our friends and for us," the candidate said.

Mr. Romney placed his criticism of the Administration's response to the attacks in Libya and elsewhere last month in this larger context. He stepped above the daily sniping over who knew what when and brought up the larger conflict. Contrary to the initial White House denials, Islamist terrorists burned down the consulate in Benghazi, killing the American Ambassador. This is part of a struggle started on 9/11 "between liberty and tyranny, justice and oppression, hope and despair," Mr. Romney said.

President Obama deserves credit for killing Osama bin Laden, but the Republican challenger is right to say that doesn't amount to a successful foreign policy. In the Middle East, as well as in Europe and Asia, current policy has been passive and ad hoc. Al Qaeda is far from dead, contrary to Obama spin. And the President's campaign pitch that the "tide of war is receding" is either naïve or politically calculated, or both.

The boys in Chicago will keep saying that Mr. Obama has "strengthened our alliances and restored our standing." But come again? Ask Israel, Poland or Saudi Arabia how confident they are of America's friendship and resolve these days. The fires across the Middle East, from Libya to Syria to Iran, rage in a vacuum created by the perception that the U.S. is withdrawing from the region. Weakness emboldens adversaries, as Mr. Romney put it, whether Russia's Vladimir Putin, violent Arab Islamists or Iran's mullahs.

Mr. Romney's words were bolder than his proposals. He scored President Obama for abandoning the Syrians in their bloody 20-month struggle against Bashar al-Assad, who wasn't abandoned by his friends in Tehran and Moscow. The Turks and Saudis, who want to topple Assad, won't act without American buy-in.

Yet Mr. Romney promised only to work "through our international partners" to arm the Syrian opposition, which is not much more than the Obama Administration is doing. Mr. Romney might have called for direct American arms supplies or a possible no-fly zone or humanitarian corridors. He wants to avoid any suggestion of overseas adventures, but here was an opportunity to strike a substantive contrast with Mr. Obama.

On Iran, Mr. Romney recognized the aspirations of the country's people for self-determination and their hatred for a repressive theocratic regime—in contrast to Mr. Obama's shameful refusal to support Iran's democratic movement in 2009.

On Iran's nuclear drive, Mr. Romney said he would boost the U.S. Navy presence in the Persian Gulf and strengthen economic sanctions, which Mr. Obama tried to water down in Congress before taking credit for them. But Mr. Romney notably did not repeat his July proposal that Iran must give up its demand to enrich uranium. The U.S. and Europe have wasted years looking for a diplomatic agreement to let the mullahs "enrich" peacefully. It'd be nice if the GOP candidate had taken this option off the table.

Mr. Obama and Vice President Biden have tried to use Mr. Romney's critique of their "run for the exits" strategy in Iraq and Afghanistan to portray him as a war monger. Among the better lines in the Romney speech was his rebuttal: "The route to war—and to potential attacks here at home—is a politically timed retreat that abandons the Afghan people to the same extremists who ravaged their country and used it to launch the attacks of 9/11." The details of his Afghan policy are vague, but count the disavowal of hasty drawdowns as an improvement.

In advocating a robust role for the U.S. overseas, Mr. Romney is placing himself in a long bipartisan tradition from Truman to Bush, while comparing Mr. Obama to Jimmy Carter in Presidential weakness. Foreign policy won't decide this election, but voters should be pleased that the Republican has forcefully made a case for renewed American leadership in the world.

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